The American Spectator

Special Report

The Coming Conservative Platform Fight

By Jeffrey Lord on 1.22.08 @ 12:08AM

The 2008 Republican platform "will be very important for conservatives," says America's former Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton.

Listening to the familiar voice over the phone, I thought back in time to the first moment I discussed a Republican platform with Bolton. It was the summer of 1984, and the man who would become famous for telling the North Koreans, the Iranians, and all those hilariously snooty elitists at the United Nations where to get off was, early in his career, telling me a politer version of the same thing.

Why? Bolton was the newly appointed executive director of the Committee on Resolutions -- the Platform Committee -- of the 1984 Republican National Convention. This was the convention that would gather in Dallas to re-nominate President Ronald Reagan. My then boss, former Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis (known to history as the man who advised Reagan to fire the striking air traffic controllers), had been assigned by the White House to represent the President in the writing of the GOP Platform. Lewis asked me, as his chief of staff, to start with the obvious -- reading the current platform draft that had been written by Bolton's committee staff. There was, we quickly discovered, an obstacle to this seemingly simple task. Determined to keep the platform draft confidential -- even from the White House! -- Bolton refused my request.

As it turned out, I was not alone. Not only could a representative of the White House not get a copy of the initial draft, neither could various party luminaries elected to the Platform Committee. One congressman complained to the media that the platform draft was "the best kept secret since the Manhattan project."

After some skirmishing in which the White House impressed upon Bolton and his then boss, Platform Committee chairman and Mississippi Congressman Trent Lott, that President Reagan had a considerable interest in seeing to it that whatever was said in the Platform jibed with administration policy, the problem was quickly straightened out. I got my draft, and began living with every jot and tittle as the process ground forward. In spite of our clash, my respect for both Bolton's ability and his devotion to conservative principles was sealed on the spot. The summer was spent with both of us and a gradually expanding group of Reaganites beyond his staff reading, re-reading -- and writing and re-writing -- every single paragraph, line and, quite literally, every punctuation mark that would express with precision the platform upon which Ronald Reagan would stand for re-election. Eventually that draft was turned over to the Platform Committee itself when it finally assembled in Dallas.

THERE'S MORE TO THE POINT here than this simple anecdote. What John Bolton was about that summer was seeing to it that the 1984 Republican Platform did not just become one more White House policy paper like a State of the Union speech. Which is to say a document drafted by government bureaucrats, any number of whom were not only not conservatives but had an open hostility to the conservative movement. Bolton saw the platform as a vital document that could forthrightly state conservative principles, both in the moment and well into the future. The reason Bolton was saying no to me was that he understood at a core level that the 1984 platform, the platform on which Ronald Reagan as the leader of the modern conservative movement would run for re-election, was not just another election year document. Bolton had already figured out, as he would say years later in his book, the depressing reality that the "political" leadership of the executive branch was more intent on endorsing what they had done in office than reaffirming the principles underlying the entire Reagan presidency.

I represented the "White House." The "White House" is, of course, in reality a building filled with a lot more people than just the president. In fact it was the nerve center of the entire federal government, the federal establishment even in Reagan's Washington well stocked with non-conservatives. Ergo, giving me a copy was opening the door to the possibility that the conservative principles Reagan had campaigned on in 1980 -- and wanted to campaign on again in 1984 -- were at risk of being watered down in the initial platform drafts to please GOP liberals, moderates, self-congratulating office-holders or even worse, conservative-hating professional bureaucrats. Which in turn meant that the future of the conservative movement would be compromised, the platform interpreted as the farthest-most edge of legitimate conservatism.

As Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker, a leading GOP liberal and Platform Committee member would eventually confess, "what's involved here is 1988." Meaning, this platform was really about the future of the Republican Party and conservatism in the GOP after Reagan. It was not only about 1988, Bolton realized, it was about the long-term future of conservatism period -- a future that is at this the moment -- 24 years later -- the present.

BOLTON WASN'T ALONE, of course. North Carolina's Senator Jesse Helms arrived in Dallas telling the media that he would "not let go unchallenged" anything in the platform that contradicted what the New York Times referred to as "the conservative philosophy he shares with Mr. Reagan." Helms pointedly noted that he had been asked by the White House to sit in on these sessions, which was decidedly true. Drew Lewis had seen to that. So too, with the same purpose, were several young conservative congressman on the platform scene, led by Georgia's Newt Gingrich, New York's Jack Kemp, and Minnesota's Vin Weber.

As we watch the 2008 Republican primary season unfold, the questions no one is paying attention to are the same as they were when Bolton and I were haggling in 1984 -- except even more so. They were the central reason for the presence back then of Helms, and the young rebels Gingrich, Kemp and Weber. What will the 2008 Republican Platform say? How true to conservative principles will it be? How can conservatives ensure that when it comes time to write the Republican platform 24 years from now the same care is taken to specifically reflect the core conservative principles that Bolton and others took so much time with 24 years ago?

Indeed, is the point of the whole exercise to be kind to President Bush -- or will it take issue with some administration policies that conservatives feel are off-principle? Will the Bush White House team be insisting on inserting language that ratifies the Bush policies on Iraq, where conservatives would presumably agree, but also on Iran and North Korea, where Bolton and others might object? What about government spending, immigration, and other issues? Will the prospective nominee insist that the platform represent not conservative principles but his own personal worldview, attempting however subtly to walk away from the conservative principles Ronald Reagan fought so hard to instill? Principles that are not about Reagan himself but rather about the political law of gravity that is conservatism.

If there's anything that has been apparent at Republican Conventions since at least 1960, when nominee-to-be Vice President Richard Nixon met to secretly hatch platform strategy with rival New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller in Rockefeller's Fifth Avenue apartment, it's that conservatives consider the platform of America's conservative party theirs to write. Nixon's secret meeting with the liberal Rocky, dubbed "The Compact of Fifth Avenue," set off howls of rage from conservatives -- who were at that very moment gathered at the site of the Chicago convention writing what they assumed would be the actual platform. When a Rockefeller press release revealed that Nixon and his liberal rival had other ideas, and that Rockefeller's demands were to be inserted in the already drafted document, the reaction was an instant firestorm. Barry Goldwater promptly called a press conference in Chicago, labeling the Compact a "surrender" to liberalism and the "Munich of the Republican Party." The Convention briefly flew out of control, with conservatives and the platform committee now in open revolt, cries of "treason" to principle in the air. In the end, the platform issue was resolved, but the aftertaste was bitter.

Ever since, conservatives have massed themselves for Republican platform gatherings with the kind of attention to detail worthy of Eisenhower's planning of D-Day. Hence the young Mr. Bolton's instant hostility to what seemed to me a very simple request. A quiet lunch with Bolton, myself, and our respective bosses Lott and Lewis and movement and White House stayed on the same page for the duration (admittedly with some difficulty). Longtime conservatives Charlie Black and Martin Anderson quickly took a hand, working tirelessly on this project. As events turned out, Bolton was an unsung hero of that platform battle, displaying all the qualities that would later make him famous as the most effective U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations since Reagan's outspoken Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bolton's friend. He was outspoken, blunt -- and always on conservative point.

SO WHO BETTER TO ASK about the shaping of the upcoming 2008 Republican Platform than John Bolton? Catching him as his new book Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations begins its climb up the bestseller list, I asked him for his thoughts on the platform process and its importance in expressing conservative ideas irrespective of an incumbent president and a new nominee. And of course, I couldn't resist asking right at the start whether he would be willing to testify at a platform hearing on American foreign policy.

He certainly sounded ready to do just that. Unsurprisingly, the now former Ambassador is eager for the opportunity to play a role in 2008. While acknowledging that the platform of any American political party does not have quite the same impact as it would have in Britain's parliamentary system, the platform of a U.S. party, he says, still counts. He pointed out that after a two-term presidency the process gives conservatives a chance "to gather themselves," something he knows first-hand can be "quite helpful."

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